Genre: Fiction

National Book Critics Circle Announces Award Winners

The winners of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Awards have been announced. The annual awards are given for books of poetry, fiction, memoir, nonfiction, biography, and criticism published in the United States in the previous year.



The winners are:

Poetry: House of Lords and Commons: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Ishion Hutchinson

Fiction: LaRose (Harper) by Louise Erdrich

Memoir: Lab Girl (Knopf) by Hope Jahren

General Nonfiction: Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (Crown) by Matthew Desmond

Biography: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright) by Ruth Franklin

Criticism: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury) by Carol Anderson

The award-winners were announced last night at a ceremony in New York City, during which the NBCC also honored the winners of three more prizes: Yaa Gyasi received the John Leonard Prize for her debut novel, Homegoing; Margaret Atwood received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; and Michelle Dean received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing.

The NBCC also announced the inaugural recipients of its Emerging Critics Fellowship, a new program that “aspires to identify, nurture, and support the development of the next generation of critics.” The fellows are Taylor Brorby, Paul W. Gleason, Zachary Graham, Yalie Saweeda Kamara, Summer McDonald, Ismail Muhamad, and Heather Scott Partington.

Established in 1974, the National Book Critics Circle is comprised of seven hundred working critics and book review editors throughout the country, and has administered its awards since 1975. The prizes honor “the best books published in the past year in the United States,” and is considered one of the most prestigious awards in the publishing industry.

T2 Trainspotting

Caption: 

T2 Trainspotting is the sequel to director Danny Boyle’s 1996 film, Trainspotting, an adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s debut novel of the same name. The sequel, based on Welsh’s novel Porno (Norton, 2002), takes place twenty years later and reunites cast members Ewen Bremner, Robert Carlyle, Kelly Macdonald, Ewan McGregor, and Jonny Lee Miller.

Genre: 

Teenage Hate

Caption: 

“There was something blurry about it, how she tipped moment by moment between woman and child.” In this 2012 video, Leopoldine Core reads from her short story “Teenage Hate” at the Center for Fiction. Her debut short story collection, When Watched (Penguin Books, 2016), is a finalist for the 29th annual Lambda Literary Awards.

Genre: 

Hari Kunzru

Caption: 

“I’ve always been quite preoccupied with identity—personal identity—and also how the individual is constructed or constituted by larger social forces...” Hari Kunzru, author most recently of White Tears (Knopf, 2017), talks about his thematic interests and a book project on privacy and surveillance which he worked on during his fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin.

Genre: 

Multiple Versions

3.15.17

In “The Emotional Realist Talks to Ghosts” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, George Saunders discusses the different stages of writing his debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017). The long process included attempting a third-person version of the story, as well as a play. Though neither form was quite right, Saunders says, “It made me more convinced that there was definitely a story there.” Take a short story in progress and rewrite one particular scene in two new forms—from a different narrative point of view, and in a dramatic script format. What are the main ideas that remain consistent and integral to the story throughout all three versions?

Pages

Subscribe to Fiction